James
4
- What causes fights and quarrels among you?
Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?
- You want something but don't get it. You
kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight.
You do not have, because you do not ask God.
- When you ask, you do not receive, because
you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
- You adulterous people, don't you know that
friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a
friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
- Or do you think Scripture says without reason
that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely ?
- But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture
says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble."
- Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the
devil, and he will flee from you.
- Come near to God and he will come near to
you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
- Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter
to mourning and your joy to gloom.
- Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he
will lift you up.
- Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone
who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges
it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment
on it.
- There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the
one who is able to save and destroy. But you--who are you to judge your neighbor
?
- Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow
we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and
make money."
- Why, you do not even know what will happen
tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while
and then vanishes.
- Instead, you ought to say, "If it is
the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that."
- As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting
is evil.
- Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought
to do and doesn't do it, sins.
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